1984

Elizabeth

On February 14th I received a letter from Elizabeth in response to the one I written her back in January. 

Dear Larry,  

I’m glad you wrote back, as I had not intended to lose contact with you, as seems to be the pattern. I’m enjoying getting my Ph.D., perhaps I wasn’t clear about that, but the discipline and difficulty required were unexpected.  I’m sure you know how many hassles school involves and in a Ph.D. program its almost like taking a magnification glass to the usual hassles and enlarging them greatly. Also, I think the field of clinical psychology attracts a bizarre assortment of individuals, both faculty and students! Age is a factor too; lots of times its hard to take crap that maybe at 20 or so you would have swallowed. Sexism is a very blatant feature of the faculty and it is difficulty at times coping with I tall. But one does cope, or at least I try. I work literally all the time though.  I’m teaching 3 sections of general psychology, which I get paid for doing, though paid little ~90-/wk!!  The program pays my tuition, so that’s good. It sounds like you’re doing well, though I can hardly remember when you weren’t on top of things. I have a regression analysis course in which we use computer analysis – WYLBUR and SPSS  packages – its sure a lazy way to do statistical analysis, so I’m becoming slightly technocratic, but only slightly. I wish I could have seen you at Christmas. My next break is not until March, but summer is near, in the sense school end – one year down – about in April – late.

                                                Elizabeth

Well at least she was getting paid and knowing her, she would somehow manage.  I don’t know if I wrote back right away but would do so at some time in the year.  Another thing I don’t recall is whether I shared the letters I received from Elizabeth with Julie.  I had told Julie about Elizabeth and it was not like me to hide such from Julie.  I filed Elizabeth’s letters along with all the other letters I received from friends and family in my filing cabinet in a folder labeled “Letters”, so if I did not share the letters with Julie, she could have anytime looked at them, it would have been fine with me.   My relationship with Elizabeth was like writing to some far away pen-pal like we did in elementary school, I enjoyed hearing about her life and telling her about mine.  Did I still love her, yes, but it had faded to a more, fondness, looking back way, the passion of my early days was gone with that passion now being focused on my wife. 

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